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WATCH: First Official Trailer For ‘Chappaquiddick’

   DailyWire.com

On Wednesday, the first official trailer for “Chappaquiddick” was released.

Sometime after 11 p.m. on July 18, 1969, then-Senator Ted Kennedy left a party on Chappaquiddick Island. A woman named Mary Jo Kopechne was in the car with him. After allegedly taking a wrong turn, the vehicle plunged into Poucha Pond. Kennedy escaped, leaving Kopechne behind.

Kennedy later claimed that after he extricated himself from the sinking vehicle, he attempted to dive down into the water multiple times to save Kopechne, but was unsuccessful. He also claimed that he and two others, Joseph Gargan and Paul Markham, returned to the scene in an attempt to rescue Kopechne a second time, but again failed.

A New York Times article from 1974 notes that it wasn’t until after the vehicle had been reported in the water that Kennedy turned himself in — ten hours after the accident occurred:

Kennedy said he wanted to call his friend and sometime attorney, Burke Marshall, for advice, and he wanted to make the call from a booth that assured privacy. Gargan suggested a phone on the Chappaquiddick side of the ferry passage, and they went there sometime between 9 and 9:30, remaining 20 minutes or so. Then they were told by the ferryman that the wrecked auto had been spotted and Miss Kopechne’s body recovered. Now that the word was out, Kennedy rode the ferry back to Edgartown and trotted off to turn himself in.

The article adds that if Kennedy had simply called for help, the fire department likely could have gotten Kopechne out of the water within approximately an hour, potentially saving her life:

John N. Farrar, captain of the Edgartown Fire Department’s Scuba Search and Rescue Division, says he found Miss Kopechne’s “head cocked back, face pressed into the foot well, hand holding onto the front edge of the back seat. By holding herself in a position such as this, she could avail herself of the last remaining air in the car.” Farrar believes “she died of suffocation in her own air void. But it took her at least three or four hours to die.”

On July 25, just seven days later, according to History.com, Kennedy “pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, received a two-month suspended sentence, and had his license suspended for a year.”

That evening, in a televised statement, he called the delayed reporting of the accident “indefensible” but vehemently denied that he been involved in any improprieties with Kopechne. He also asked his constituents to help him decide whether to continue his political career. Receiving a positive response, he resumed his senatorial duties at the end of a month.

While the exact details of the 1969 tragedy remain a mystery, living in the realm of personal testimonies and circumstantial evidence, the incident was enough to derail any presidential hopes Kennedy might have had.

“Chappaquiddick,” starring Jason Clarke, Kate Mara, Ed Helms, Jim Gaffigan, and Bruce Dern, looks to tell the “untold true story” of what happened on that night nearly 50 years ago, as well as what occurred subsequently.

The film is set for release on April 6, 2018. You can check out the first trailer here:

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